aspects of Houma's work-the con-
trolled burns and the application of
dispersants-were under way, but
these measures occurred forty miles
offshore, largely out of public view.
What was visible was a national orga-
nization that was still figuring out how
to structure itself: Boom that Houma
had ordered quickly accumulated at
large staging areas, and more than two
hundred thousand feet of it was de-
ployed by responders in small boats.
Still, politicians across the Gulf were
scrambling for boom of their own, and
some complained to the media that
they weren't getting enough of it. Allen
told me that "the amount of boom sent
to various states was almost a political
litmus test on federal support." Inside
the Unified Command, this phenom-
enon became known as the Boom
Wars.
When the President arrived in Ven-
ice, Nungesser was among the people
he met with. "He introduced him-
self," Nungesser told me. "He said,
What's going on? What do we got to
d "',,,
get oner
Nungesser explained that he wanted
BP to pay for three jack-up boats-
barges that can be cranked up on tall
pylons and suspended in the air-so
that members of his strike force could
clean up oil and deploy boom around
the clock. "The President said to Allen,
'Commander, what's wrong with the
plan?' " Nungesser told me. Allen
looked to a local Coast Guard officer
for an explanation. 'We deploy from
Venice every day and we don't think
it' s necessary," the officer said, adding
that the boats were expensive, and
would have no real operational impact.
But Nungesser reiterated his case, and
Obama told Allen, "I want to get Bil-
ly's jack-up boats out there." The boats
were hired the next day, and Obama
called Nungesser to insure that it had
happened.
In Venice, Stanton spoke about
what might happen once the oil made
landfall. "It's going to be very ugly," he
predicted.
"You're a pretty gloomy guy," Obama
said.
' 'Y ." h . d " Th 11 C
es, SIr, e sal. ey ca me ap-
tain Eeyore."
Stanton explained some of the mea-
sures that Houma intended to take: dis-
---
1'"
,..,
o I
,
''Now boarding-all the people who pushed their way in
front of the people supposed to be boarding."
.
persants, skimming, and the use of con-
trolled burns in the marsh-an idea
that Jindal dismissed as crazy. By then,
the Governor had sidelined the state
agency responsible for oil spills and
begun to manage Louisianà s response
with his closest staffers. Frustrated with
the Coast Guard's allocation of re-
sources, and convinced that the pace at
Houma was "lackadaisical," he teamed
up with the parishes and created his
own booming plan. Like Nungesser,
Jindal was determined not to let oil
enter the Mississippi Delta. His plan
for Louisiana called for five million feet
of containment boom, and an aide told
Stanton that the state wanted it within
a week. "The number was just astonish-
ing to me," Stanton recalled. "When I
got back from that meeting, I remem-
ber very clearly telling BP, 'You have
got to provide this boom.' I said, 'You
need to begin ramping up your shore-
line strategy. Whatever you think you
need, I need you to multiply it times
three.' It got to the point where we had
exhausted every single boom source in
the continental United States."
Eventually, three hundred thousand
feet of boom were being made for the
response every week, and more was
shipped in from fourteen countries.
'We had to work at these end-of-the-
.
road communities where there is not
enough dirt to hold millions of feet of
boom," Jim Black, a BP manager who
served as Houma's operations chief,
told me. "They didn't have infrastruc-
ture-hotels in the range of a few hun-
dred rooms. And yet it is also their
community. We are the interlopers re-
sponding to our emergency in their
back yards."
Still, complaints about the distribu-
tion of boom persisted. Garret Graves,
Louisianà s head of coastal restoration,
told me that Jindal deployed National
Guardsmen to track boom from one
staging area to another . 'We never could
figure out where it went. We don't know
if it went to the Bermuda Triangle, or
what," he said. 'There was this mystery
five miles of high-seas boom floating
around. A month later, we found it was
still in a staging area."
In late May, the state decided to
demonstrate some of these issues to
Stanton by flying him over areas that
needed boom, and staging areas where
it sat, apparently unused. "We said,
'Let's get him out here,'" Graves told
me. "He came back, and blood vessels
were popping out of his neck and head.
He was yelling on the phone." Stanton
by then had grown frustrated with the
Unified Command, an officer told me;
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 14, 2011 45